Building a West Texas Giant: Christopher Columbus Slaughter and the Long S (November 3, 2025)
by Scott Sosebee
Ask any person, anywhere, to draw a “Texan” and I will bet you almost anything that the result you will get is an image of “cowboy,” a male with a large, brimmed hat, boots, and perhaps astride a horse. Popular culture and mythical stereotype have ingrained that image into the minds of the whole planet when the word “Texas” appears. Somewhat ironically, that icon is representative of a very short period—roughly 1868-1890s—in the state’s history and involved only a very few people since the mass of Texans during that period were subsistence farmers who eked out a living quite often on marginal land. Those who were “cowboys” were more often found in South and West Texas, and the trope that Hollywood and pulp fiction novels created around the “cowboy” hardly represented the true nature of the work of tending cattle and building ranches.
Some of the largest ranches in the state evolved in West Texas, and more specifically on the vast plains located west of Fort Worth, north to the Oklahoma line in the Panhandle, and then out to the Pecos River in far West Texas. The names of such ranches have become familiar names to Texans, outfits such as the XIT, the Matador, Espuela, and the 6666 that have become the subject of lore. Surprisingly, the operation that by the turn of the twentieth century was the second largest in West Texas with over a million acres and forty thousand head of cattle is one that is not as recognizable—the Long S Ranch owned by Christopher Columbus “C.C.” Slaughter, a man who did not “fit” the image of the popular culture rancher. He preferred living in the city, wore a business suit not a “ten gallon” hat, and was a devout Baptist.
Like many of those West Texas ranchers, C.C. Slaughter was a native East Texan. Born in 1837 in Sabine County, young Slaughter’s family farmed some land and raised a few head of cattle that they allowed to free roam in the river bottoms of the Sabine and other tributaries. Slaughter received an education at Larissa College in Cherokee County and then returned to the family home. Young Chris was a fine hand, and gained a reputation as an expert drover, which led his father, George, to trust him with the responsibility of driving the family’s almost one hundred head of cattle to holdings they had acquired in Freestone County. They next moved to acreage in Palo Pinto County where they made sizable profits selling beef to Fort Belknap and the adjacent Brazos River Indian Reservations.
When the Civil War ended, Slaughter—along with his father—joined the cattle drive boom when they drove herds, cattle belonging to them and other nearby ranchers—to Kansas City where they could get more than forty dollars a head for beef. George Slaughter began to devote more time to his Baptist ministry after 1870, so C.C., as he now referred to himself, took over the family cattle business. He bought more stock and then moved his herd to Mitchell County in 1876 where he established the Long S Ranch near where the Colorado River emerged from an underground spring. Slaughter enlarged his herd at a fortuitous time as the Texas cattle raising boom was about to become one of the largest commercial expansions in the state’s history as ranches began to grow all over the West Texas plains.
Slaughter operated an open-range business mostly on the public domain in Mitchell County, but as the twentieth century approached the cattle business had begun to transform. The public’s palate started to favor pure-bred beef, while at the same time barbed wire made large holdings possible, and the open-range era came to a close. Slaughter adjusted and bought 250,000 acres in Cochran and Hockley Counties and moved the Lazy S operations north and west. He turned to raising Herefords when he first bought Charles Goodnight’s herd as well as the champion bull of the 1893 Chicago Exposition, and “Sir Bredwell,” the acclaimed champion of the 1897 Omaha Livestock Exposition.
He then went on a land-buying spree. He doubled his holdings in 1897 when he purchased 250,000 more acres and then leased almost 300,000 more from his neighbors. He divided his land into six pastures, began to follow the most up-to-date raising techniques, and put his son, George Morgan, in charge of day-to-day operations. It is worth noting that C.C. Slaughter never lived on any of his ranches as he and his family lived in an opulent house in Dallas. George Morgan Slaughter did live on the ranch at least part time and he established line camps, each with its own range manager, within the six pastures that consisted of an improved corral, barn, windmills, and living quarters. Eventually, the Lazy S built attractive housing for the family of the line managers to live in year-round. Slaughter’s expansion gained him the moniker as the “Cattle King of Texas,” and he counted more than a million acres and almost 50,000 head of cattle under his control by 1906. He controlled a good portion of the vast territory between Big Spring and the New Mexico border, a distance of more than two hundred miles.
Slaughter, who in addition to ranching made a fortune in banking, began to experience failing health in the mid-1910s, which led him to begin to look for ways to liquidate his assets. He divided much of his holdings in 1908 and sold the bulk of his land to a limited partnership who hoped to sell small plots for potential farms. That venture failed and ownership reverted back to Slaughter. He installed Jack Allen to manage the operations, and they once again began to prosper as a cattle enterprise, but after he broke his hip in 1915, Slaughter turned his business over to son George. C.C. Slaughter, the “Cattle King of Texas,” passed away in January 1919, and by the 1930s most of the land he once owned and controlled had been divided and sold. His name and fame seemed to pass along with him as more flamboyant operators became seared into the consciousness of popular culture. Perhaps the world could not accept the accomplishments of a quiet son of a Baptist preacher who did not fit the “image” they wanted to have of a “cowman.”
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.